About time

 

Dear Readers,

Today, though cooler, cloudier and not quite dawned into decipherable weather yet, seems a “get something right” day.  I have these feelings when I wake, and my body, more than my mind, itches to follow truer paths.

So, after the usual morning rota, here I am again, at the very end of the month, coming back to you.  This is about time…pun accepted.

The other morning, eyeing the bedside clock with its dangling minute hand (it had dropped off its perch some months ago), it occurred to me that I need no longer follow the ancient way of clocking the hour, with no minutes to clutter up the between. As I had been doing each waking since it fell.  I could fix this, surely.  Taking the clock in hand, I pushed and pulled each hand along the center post until it seemed secure, until the minute hand grasped its task and began to go round.  Unfortunately, the hour hand now hung, retired.  I fiddled with it a while, but alas, either the hour posted or the minute posted…not both. (The alarm hand, I’m sorry to say, never varied from its strident path.)

So I left it.  It had occurred to me that that dangling hour hand, giving up to the minutes’ rise, was a good metaphor for life in the last fifth of my (possible) age.  At eighty, it isn’t hours that matter any more, but minutes. (Meanwhile, the alarm has no trouble sounding).

I do have other clocks to watch…the grandmother clock in the living room, which needs daily adjusting, for it loses a few minutes overnight; the clock on my phone eludes showing me the time…its tiny numbers at the top of the screen need a password to be seen on demand.

There are kitchen digitals on the appliances, which need new numbers each time the power goes off, usually when I am off traveling. I used to have a real kitchen clock, too, but one day soon after I moved back here, it fell off the wall and crashed, useless on the tile floor.

I don’t know what made the Shaker-made clock on the stairs stop at 10:37 about 7 or 8 years ago; it hasn’t worked since.  And while I am at it, tucked in a drawer are several watches I’ve managed to stop simply by wearing them; batteries find my pulse and die.  Really.

But that bedside clock with its stopped hours is reminding me that these days, minutes seem to matter more…should matter more.

Time has always been my nemesis…I’m sure I’ve told you that before.  I waste a lot of it, dawdling through some days (unlike this one) when I could write, could do art, could write long letters to friends, could sew and fix and weed and clean and walk and go to the movies or the museum.  Instead, those days I play word games, think about words, imagine art possible, make up menus for brunches and dinners I might or might not hold, watch movies, read.  In between I get up and do what I need to survive...grocery shop, hardware and garden shop, library and book shop.,,very much an errand life.

Until one day I wake up and decide it’s time to get out of town, to explore some new horizon.

Fortunately, I’ve been doing a lot of that this spring.  February found me on a quick trip to my sister just across the state, but March, April and May reached farther, beginning with a voyage to Morocco, which has been on my travel list for too long unmet. 

It took a friend to make me raise my hand to join her there.  At first, she and her partner had looked into Turkey, but tangles ensued.  Eastern Europe?  I thought maybe Morocco, and off we went, first to Marrakesh together, and then to spread ourselves variously across the country.

 

           

It was wonderful, absorbing, enlightening, inspiring, freeing in a way I needed.  Morocco is a country of story and color, old and new surprises, ancient history and both ancient and modern sense of knowing the earth.  After a few days in Marrakesh, together, where my friends' company cheered and lightened me, they went off to hike the mountains north and I, with a perfect native guide* to drive and point, went south and east to the Atlantic (directly across from the outer banks here, I discovered), for the near-independence of wandering in another continent. I wish everyone could travel there to look and see and meet and talk and listen and learn and connect.

 

Perhaps next time, I'll pull out some reflections to share with you.  But these photos are all I can deliver now.

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If you are going anywhere in that region, I give high praise to OpenDoorsMorocco for intelligent, knowledgeable, agreeable, helpful and just plain nice people at opendoorsmorocco.com.